


Gimme Shelter

by feelslikefire



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Beast Koujaku, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Mafia AU, Minor Character Death, Prostitute AU, shady monster sex, sly blue - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 13:45:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2350508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feelslikefire/pseuds/feelslikefire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Koujaku is the Yakuza Enforcer for his syndicate, feared and respected by all who know him. He meets a mysterious blue-haired prostitute, and his world changes. Obligatory yakuza/prostitute AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gimme Shelter

**Author's Note:**

> I had a really awful August, and this story was a self-indulgent gift to myself. Kisses as always to my beta [circ_bamboo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/circ_bamboo/pseuds/circ_bamboo) for the read-through.

“This kid, though, he was really something else… Got an ass like you wouldn’t believe.”

Koujaku stirs his whiskey idly, not raising his eyes from the half-empty glass. He listens with only half an ear. “Is that so,” he says, when it becomes clear that Goro requires some kind of response from him.

“I know you think you’ve seen it all, but this boy is _special_ ,” Goro says, and scoots his bar-stool a little closer to Koujaku’s, close enough that Koujaku can smell the Yakuza’s stale breath, which reeks like an off-license. Koujaku’s lip curls, and he turns to level his one good eye at Goro. Goro wilts, hunching his shoulders to make himself smaller. Koujaku half-expects him to lay his ears back like a dog. “Really,” Goro says, and licks his lips, eyes beady.

“Really,” Koujaku repeats. He raises his eyebrow, the one over the patch.

“Yeah!” The hapless accountant beams, completely oblivious, and adjusts his tie at the base of his throat. “You work so hard, Koujaku, you deserve to treat yourself.”

So that’s what this is about. Koujaku rolls his eyes and turns away again. Goro takes this as an opportunity to hail the bartender and order them both another round. Koujaku lets him. Not because he intends to drink the whiskey, although it wouldn’t hurt him even if he did, but because he’s used to this kind of thing by now. He’s the Enforcer, after all. Goro doesn’t care if Koujaku lives or dies; he just wants to have done Koujaku a favor.

“And you think this boy qualifies as treating myself,” Koujaku says. He accepts the drink when the bartender brings it, glancing at the clock above the mirror behind the bar. It’s another two hours before he can leave the Blue Lotus; two hours that seem like an eternity.

“Oh yes,” says Goro immediately, and launches into an entirely-too-detailed list of all the ways this hooker blew his feeble mind. Among other things. Koujaku finishes his old whiskey and starts on his new one. Distantly, he wonders why so many of their “family” insist on buying drinks for him, when it’s reasonably common knowledge that he can’t get drunk. Maybe they just don’t know what else to do.

Goro wags his tongue for another twenty minutes or so, only leaving Koujaku alone once Koujaku has promised to go look up this boy that Goro is so enamored off and “treat himself” to a so-called night of pleasure. Koujaku has no intention of doing anything of the sort, but lying to get left alone is not exactly at the top of his list of sins.

It’s nowhere near, actually.

* * * * *

Koujaku forgets the conversation as soon as it’s over. He goes about his business, and while he has never derived any pleasure from his work, he is very good at what he does. Most of the time, he doesn’t have to do anything beyond simply showing up, or at most, unsheathe the sword he always carries. His reputation precedes him.

Other things aside from legendary prostitutes are taking his attention at the moment, like the strange malaise that has swept through the city, a sense of fear and malice that has no tangible source but is nevertheless making itself known. There were four suicides the week before, and a police officer killed an unarmed woman earlier in the month before taking his partner’s life and then his own. People are more desperate than ever for the kind of protection Black Phoenix can offer, but that of course means that work is increasing for Koujaku’s division.

After all, someone has to make sure all those desperate people are paying for the services they so badly want.

Koujaku retires to the Blue Lotus again at the end of another brutally long week. Technically he is there as something like a bouncer, but mostly his job consists of sitting at the bar and glaring at anyone who looks like they want to make trouble. The work this week was worse than most; he visited the house of more than one family, families with young children. Children who cried and hid behind their mothers when it became necessary to remove his eyepatch.

He’s badly in the mood for something to distract him, and he’s glancing around the bar, wondering if he should seek the company of some sweet young thing tonight, when Goro comes in the front door. Something about his face is off, and Koujaku sits up, frowning. Goro looks like he hasn’t slept in days, a pallor to his skin like a man recently sick.

“Goro,” he says. Goro’s head jerks when his name is called, but when he spots Koujaku he comes shuffling over to join him at the bar. Koujaku’s sense of unease increases.

“I’m not in trouble, am I?” Goro asks him; he does not bother to disguise the anxiety in his voice.

Koujaku looks at him for a moment, frown deepening. “No, not at all,” he says. “You look half-dead, though. What happened?”

Goro shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says dully. “Just haven’t slept well the past few days. Bad dreams, you know.” He gestures vaguely, an indication that surely Koujaku knows of whence he speaks.

Koujaku does, but while they both wear suits, like every member of their organization, Goro is a glorified accountant and Koujaku is the most feared man in Black Phoenix. Nothing in Goro’s job description should give him the kind of haunted look he’s currently sporting.

Unless, of course, it isn’t his job that did it to him. “Maybe you ought to go see that prostitute you were so fond of last week,” Koujaku says lightly.

Goro stares at him uncomprehendingly. “What prostitute?” he asks.

Koujaku snorts. “What prostitute? The blue-haired one. You were so enamored of him I couldn’t even get you to shut up about him. You…” Koujaku trails off, staring at the way Goro’s eyes have gone wide and fearful. Goro’s hands tremble; he leans hard against the counter, as though afraid Koujaku will strike him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Goro. A whine is creeping into his voice, a coward’s mewl, the voice of a man who shakes and cries when put against the wall, instead of pushing back. “I d-didn’t, I didn’t do anything, I—”

“You’re not in trouble,” Koujaku cuts in. He pauses a moment, thinking. “You really don’t remember?”

Goro shakes his head tightly, never taking his eyes from Koujaku. It occurs to Koujaku that Goro thinks Koujaku is playing with him, fabricating an excuse to kill him. “Nevermind,” says Koujaku, and sits back. “I must have been thinking of someone else.”

He lets Goro go, watching the man scamper off, his relief so tangible Koujaku half-expects him to piss on the floor on his way out the door. But Goro’s well-being isn’t really Koujaku’s concern, here. He has a job to do.

One part of his job is making sure those that owe, pay. The other part is eliminating any potential threat to their interests.

It looks like he might need to pay a certain prostitute a visit. Perhaps the boy has something interesting to tell him.

* * * * *

The boy in question isn’t hard to find. Koujaku finds him at a bar across town, perhaps a 10-minute drive from his usual stomping grounds. Koujaku walks in the door and spots his target immediately: he’s running to and fro behind the bar, his blue hair up in a high ponytail-twist, wearing tight jeans and a striped t-shirt, moving with the practiced speed of an experienced bartender.

Koujaku makes his way slowly through the bar, which is crowded with what seems to be a jovial Friday night crew. The blue-haired boy is very popular; both men and women crowd together at the bar, trying to get his attention, and Koujaku thinks it’s for more than just a drink. Koujaku tries to cast his mind back, wanting to recall his target’s name, but he must have tuned that part of Goro’s endless prattling out, because nothing comes to mind. He settles for wrestling a spot at the end of the bar, and waits for the boy to make his way down to where Koujaku leans against the counter. Despite the crowd, it’s only a few minutes.

The boy appears, calm but quick, a warm smile firmly in place. “Hey there, what’ll it be?” His eyes are strangely bright, a hazel that’s almost metallic.

“Sake,” says Koujaku. “And a minute of your time, if you have it.”

“For a handsome man like you, I have two,” the boy says immediately, and flashes a smirk that Koujaku does not believe in for a second. He drops out of sight, emerging five seconds later with a small cup and a bottle of what Koujaku assumes is the house sake.

“Leave the bottle,” Koujaku says, and when the boy reaches out to set both bottle and cup in front of Koujaku, Koujaku’s hand shoots out quick as a viper to grasp that slender wrist.

To his credit, the boy doesn’t even flinch. “Sorry mister, I’m busy,” he says, and waits for Koujaku to let his wrist go.

Koujaku does not let go. “I forgot to mention,” he says. “Takeuchi Goro sends his regards.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, but thanks,” says the boy. “You gonna keep my wrist as a souvenir or what?”

“He has a tattoo of a large black bird on his right shoulder-blade,” says Koujaku, not dropping his gaze or the boy’s wrist. The imperial phoenix is their syndicate’s mark, or part of it; Goro doesn’t have the complete back-piece, because he’s not highly ranked enough, but everyone in their organization has that bird on their person somewhere. Koujaku’s takes up his entire back, resplendent with flowers and fish and dozens of other little details, due to his rank.

The boy stares at him—there. An almost imperceptible flinch around his eyes, a tightening of the skin. “Sorry, still don’t know him,” the boy says, “but if you can wait a few minutes, we can talk a little more and maybe you can help jog my memory.”

Satisfied, Koujaku sits back, releasing the boy’s wrist at last. He’s made his point. He doesn’t think it’ll be necessary to work any harder than that. So he waits. He sits and drinks his whiskey, and he waits for the crowd surging around him at the bar to wane a little bit.

It takes a few more hours, but he has time. These days, he doesn’t have much else.

Finally, the sea of humanity thins out a bit. Only a few groups remain, most of them crammed into booths around the room, entirely intent on their own conversation. The boy spends a few minutes at his register, sorting through receipts and closing checks, and then he says something to his fellow bartender and walks down the bar to where Koujaku sits nursing his second bottle of sake that evening.

“Let’s go sit down,” the boy says, and he doesn’t so much as slow his pace as he passes Koujaku en route to one of the empty booths, one that’s more distant from the few remaining people in the bar. Koujaku lets himself stare at the fabled ass in front of him, but he says nothing about it, simply slides into the seat across from his mystery bartender.

“So, you came to see me because Goro told you about me?” The boy settles into his seat, regarding him with a complicated sort of expression that Koujaku doesn’t quite know how to interpret.

“That’s right,” Koujaku says.

“Well,” says the boy. “I guess I can’t complain about good referrals.” He doesn’t exactly look happy, though. The boy’s face is full of intelligence, not at all like the artifice Koujaku has come to expect from people who sell their sex for money. He doesn’t have the cynical look in his eyes, the calculating expression experienced whores seem to have. In fact, he looks downright normal.

“What’s your name?” Koujaku asks, and on the boy’s face a flicker of a smile appears again. It’s a soft, mysterious smile. Koujaku finds he wants to touch those lips, see them wrapped around his fingers; wants to see if they feel as soft as they look.

“Aoba,” says the boy. He extends his hand across the table, taking Koujaku’s almost delicately; his fingertips trace the scars that criss-cross Koujaku’s knuckles. “It’s Aoba.”

* * * * *

Aoba talks with Koujaku for a little while longer, then gets up and goes back to the bar. Koujaku finishes his drink that has made him no more drunk than any other glass of sake he’s had in his 27 years of life, and he watches Aoba while he cleans. Finally Aoba bids the other bartender farewell, and returns to Koujaku’s table, wearing a puffy coat with a bag slung over his shoulder. Koujaku stands, and watches in bemusement as Aoba slips his hand into the crook of Koujaku’s elbow, as graceful as any courtier.

“So, what are you looking for?” Aoba asks him as they walk to the door. He glances up at Koujaku, absently shoving hair that sort of needs a trim out of his face.

“I’d like you to stay with me till the morning,” Koujaku says in a low voice. “I’ll pay for the room, of course.”

Aoba grins. It’s a perfectly normal smile; it’s also not at all what Koujaku was expecting. “Good, ‘cause _I’m_ not gonna, and I’m not walking home at 2 in the morning,” he says.

“No, you aren’t,” Koujaku tells him, and covers Aoba’s hand on his arm with his own. He takes Aoba to the Edgewater, a beautiful, stately hotel that’s run by his organization. He pays for a room near the top of the building: not the penthouse, but spacious. The decor is comfortable and understated, instead of ostentatious, and Koujaku shuts and locks the door behind them, watching Aoba cross to the center of the room and drop his bag onto the floor.

“So.” Aoba shrugs out of his coat, hanging it on the back of a chair, and turns to Koujaku. He spreads his arms, and smiles. “What do you want?”

Koujaku discovers an answering smile on his face before he’s entirely aware that he’s made the expression. “I wanted to see for myself why Goro was so fixated on you,” he says, which is reasonably close to the truth, if not the whole truth.

“Fixated?” Aoba wrinkles his nose. It’s so distracting Koujaku almost misses his next words. “I _asked_ him to be discreet…”

“Discretion is not one of his better traits.” Koujaku shucks his own jacket, pushing his shirt sleeves partway up his arms. Aoba stays standing where he is, watching Koujaku approach with eyes that are just a little too wide to read as “casual.” It’s stupidly charming, and instead of grabbing Aoba and kissing him till his feet give out under him, Koujaku changes his mind at the last minute and gives Aoba a little shove. Aoba stumbles backwards, the backs of his knees catching the edge of the bed, and he topples onto it with an undignified squawk.

“Hey! What the hell!” Aoba glowers at him, his face flushed with annoyance and, Koujaku thinks, mild embarrassment.

“So much for being seductive,” Koujaku murmurs. Aoba kicks him in the shin. Koujaku leans down and kisses him, and Aoba lets him. Aoba relaxes under him after a moment, and Koujaku slides his hands up Aoba’s sides, fingertips sliding under his form-fitting shirt, brushing his thumbs against the tops of angular hip-bones.

He undresses Aoba piece by piece, taking his time; he lavishes his touches and his kisses on each inch of new skin revealed, his one good eye flicking up to take in Aoba’s reactions as he goes. It’s not the first time he’s wished for use of both eyes, the better to take in such a gorgeous sight. Aoba watches him in turn, his gaze feverish. But when Aoba tries to sit up and undress him, Koujaku gently but firmly pushes him back down to the bed, uninterested in reciprocation.

This is selfish of him, though Aoba might not realize it. Koujaku so rarely gets the chance to wreak anything but violence with his hands that he cannot pass up even a moment of a gentler sort of work—especially when he’s given such a beautiful temple at which to worship. Tonight he will be thoughtful, and patient, and sweet, and he will take this boy apart in his bed until Aoba is trembling in his arms, if only to prove to himself that he’s still capable of such tenderness. He hasn’t forgotten the suspicion that brought him to come find Aoba in the first place, but it’s easy to put aside for the moment.

Aoba is wonderfully responsive, his little sighs and muffled groans like shots of pure lust to Koujaku’s gut. He likes to kiss, it turns out, and Koujaku is happy to give him as many as he wants, more than willing to drown in his lips. It’s only when Koujaku reaches up to tug Aoba’s hair down from its messy twist that Aoba flinches—just a moment of tension and then gone, but it’s enough to make Koujaku stop. He looks at Aoba.

“Don’t stop,” Aoba says, and summons a smile.

Koujaku is not convinced. “Did I hurt you?”

Aoba hesitates. Koujaku lifts his hand, cupping Aoba’s face, his touch gentler than any of his fellows would believe. Aoba seems to sag. “My hair is really sensitive,” he says reluctantly.

“Sensitive?” Aoba nods.

Koujaku glances at the soft blue cloud that’s spread out behind Aoba’s head on the pillow. It looks so appealing; he would like nothing more than to plunge his hands into it and tug, if only to see the bow of Aoba’s back as he arches out in front of Koujaku on the bed.

But he doesn’t. “Alright,” he says instead, and kisses the spot between Aoba’s eyes.

They use a condom—Koujaku would insist even if Aoba didn’t, but they have an ample supply and there is no argument. Koujaku uses plenty of lube, watching greedily as Aoba gasps and trembles in his lap, twisting on Koujaku’s fingers. Aoba rides him, Koujaku’s arms wrapped around his slim hips, and Aoba’s hair falls all around them like an intimate, sweet-smelling curtain. They kiss, Aoba’s hips rolling slowly, and despite the eyepatch that he wears day and night, it’s the first time in memory that Koujaku can forget that he is a monster who does not deserve such tender kindness.

When they’re done, they lay in bed together, Aoba curled lazily against Koujaku, already half-asleep. He smells like sex and something sweet, anise maybe; it must be something in his shampoo. Koujaku gets up, returning with a damp washcloth. He cleans them both, and then gets into bed, Aoba immediately resuming his spot against Koujaku’s chest.

He’s beautiful. Koujaku can easily see, now, why Goro was so mesmerized by this boy. It makes it that much stranger that Goro could somehow forget about him, and again Koujaku wonders how such a thing could come to be.

* * * * *

Koujaku dreams.

He’s running, desperation making him fly. The dream is always the same, and the fright is always there, that panicked flight up the stone steps of the temple, trying always to out-run disaster, to get there first, to save her. In life, of course, he made it, but in his dreams he never does. His shadow stretches out behind him, growing long in the end-day sun, twisting sickly out of shape. Blood seeps from between the flagstones where his feet touch the ground, and all around him the world rots, tainted with the curse that he can never out-run, no matter how hard he tries.

 _No!_ he cries. _Please, don’t—!_

It’s too late. The carnage is awful: there are bodies strewn everywhere, blood slicking the flagstones and the rock garden, staining every surface, and now he realizes that the blood is on his hands, on his mouth. Horror makes the scene swim in front of his eyes; even though he promised, even though he tried so hard—

He’s shaking—no, he’s being shaken. _Koujaku,_ someone says. _Koujaku!_

“Wake up!”

Koujaku jerks upright, groping for his sword and finding nothing. It takes him several seconds to collect himself, and that’s when he actually sees Aoba sitting up in bed next to him, the moonlight flooding in through the window illuminating eyes wide with concern. Koujaku drags air into his lungs, shards of glass scraping against the inside of his chest. “Aoba,” he says haltingly. He swallows; the muscles don’t want to move.

He braces himself for the questions, but they don’t come. Mutely, Aoba holds out his arms. Koujaku hesitates, and then—because it is dark, and because he’s still drowning in the horror of the dream, his heart beating too fast in his chest—he goes, letting Aoba lay him back down and pull Koujaku’s face against his throat. Koujaku muffles his noises, dampening Aoba’s pale skin with his tears, and in the dark Aoba cannot see that the saline seeping from under Koujaku’s eyepatch is stained a murky red.

Aoba holds him till he quiets again, and to Koujaku’s inexpressible relief, he does not say a word. He merely lays quietly with Koujaku, kissing his forehead and pushing the hair out of his eyes. They fall asleep again, holding their positions reversed; this time it is Koujaku with his head pillowed on Aoba’s chest.

Koujaku fully expects the nightmares to return—he knows by now that he cannot escape them, and as he cannot drink himself to black-out, he has no choice but to accept them. But although he does dream, he can barely recall them in the morning. All he’s left with is an impression of calm, and the sense-memory of a soothing voice, telling him to rest.

* * * * *

The morning is uneventful. Koujaku can slot the whole thing up as uneventful, actually, because being nice to look at and good in bed is not supernatural. Sitting in bed and watching a boy he’s known for barely 12 hours drool on himself in his sleep and thinking it’s cute instead of stupid is also not supernatural, merely undignified.

He orders breakfast for one, to arrive in thirty minutes or so, and then wraps Aoba’s payment in his shirt and tucks it into bed next to him. Then he leaves. Aoba has the room until noon; that should be plenty of time to enjoy the breakfast and other luxuries of a paid-for suite by himself. The boy deserves it for entertaining Koujaku’s sudden demands and suspicion with grace. Koujaku feels a twinge of guilt for suspecting him of anything ill-natured in the first place, but he’s had long practice at functioning despite that particular demon on his shoulders, so he goes about his business.

But he remembers where to find Aoba, just in case.

* * * * *

He’s back at Aoba’s bar a week later.

Koujaku sits at the counter until Aoba notices him, and then once words are exchanged, he stays at the end of the bar and nurses another bottle of sake while Aoba ignores him and works the rest of his shift. He takes Aoba out for ramen first, because Aoba is hungry and tells Koujaku so, and because it is no hardship to sit in a brightly-lit restaurant and listen to Aoba tell him about his day.

He takes Aoba to the same hotel as before, and the room looks identical even though it has a different number. Koujaku takes his time with Aoba again, sucking him off sweetly, drawing a second orgasm out of him with three fingers in the boy’s ass before sliding his cock into Aoba’s warm, trembling body. Aoba clings to him, and Koujaku is careful not to grab his hair while they fuck, though he can’t quite stop himself from muttering filthy, meaningless trash into Aoba’s ear. Aoba doesn’t seem to mind.

Afters, Aoba showers and puts the TV on, curling up against Koujaku in a robe and flipping through the channels. He finds a game show that’s stupider than half the people Koujaku works with, which says something. Aoba leaves it on, then ignores it in favor of asking Koujaku dozens of questions. They’re questions like “what’s your favorite movie” and “if you were a dessert which one would you be,” and Koujaku has never had much practice in using his imagination thusly, but he tries his best. They stay up till past two in the morning, which Koujaku will feel during the next work day, but doubts he will regret much.

This time, he does not dream at all. It is his first such night in fifteen years.

* * * * *

After that, it starts to become something approaching routine: Koujaku comes to see Aoba at the bar; Koujaku takes Aoba out for a meal or at least a drink; Koujaku brings Aoba back to their usual hotel and they have sex (he will not even permit himself to think the words “make love” inside his own skull, not even in the dark); they waste a few hours after that doing nothing of worth, and Koujaku leaves in the morning before Aoba wakes up—but not before watching him sleep for a few minutes.

(If “thirty-five” can be taken to mean “a few.”)

Koujaku never asks Aoba for his personal information, but after the fourth time, Aoba asks him for his Coil, and then programs his phone number into it. “Give me warning so I know to wear something less grungy to work,” is all he says. Koujaku looks at it after, and spends too long staring at the name in his contacts list: _Seragaki Aoba._

His nights with Aoba are the nights he gets the best sleep, albeit not enough. Usually he does not dream, but from time to time he still does, and those nights Aoba wakes him and then holds him while he sobs. Aoba never asks him about it, for which Koujaku is abjectly grateful. Other than the nightmares, the dreams he does remember are always dark, and soothing, and full of a resonant voice that fills his ears and heart with peace like he has never known in life.

They don’t talk about Koujaku’s work, or anything much of import. But the first time they have something resembling an argument is when Koujaku finds bruises on Aoba’s wrists and collarbone, and Koujaku demands to know the name of the man who gave them to him. Aoba refuses.

“It’s taken care of,” he says, and Koujaku knows his temper is getting out of hand because he would swear Aoba’s eyes have slid over to gold, and that’s idiotic. Koujaku grits his teeth, and if he’s more forceful that night during sex than usual, he tries to atone for it by giving Aoba double his usual rate. Aoba almost refuses him the money altogether, but it’s Koujaku’s turn to insist. Or rather, beg.

“ _Please_ , Aoba,” he says, and Aoba goes still. “Even if it’s only for tonight, I would rather you take my money than someone else’s.”

He does not say, _so you don’t have to take a man home who’s going to hurt you_ , or _so you can spend a night alone if you want to_ , but maybe Aoba guesses, because he just swallows his protests and lets Koujaku put the money in his jacket.

Later, though, Koujaku finds the money back in his wallet. It upsets him, but for several days he’s too proud to admit to the real reason—not that he thinks Aoba has rejected him somehow, or anything of that ilk, but because for every night Aoba spends with him without taking his money, Koujaku knows that the boy will have to take that many more paying clients. And with the fresh image of bruises on Aoba’s pale skin, Koujaku’s jealousy—heretofore under control, if not altogether quiet—goes into high gear.

The mental images do a parade through his head, each one worse than the last: someone else’s hands gripping Aoba’s slender wrists, while Aoba’s face twists in pain (or worse, pleasure); some stranger on top of Aoba in bed, pulling his sensitive hair, marking his skin; some other man with his arms wrapped around Aoba, holding him tight and making him moan. Not for the first time, Koujaku wishes he was capable of getting black-out drunk, but the best he can manage is to take a little extra work for a week or two, the better to distract him from his dark, circling thoughts.

The next time he sees Aoba, he makes it exactly 30 minutes before bringing it up, along with the best solution he can think of. Aoba’s response is somehow not at all what Koujaku is expecting.

“Fuck you,” Aoba says flatly. Koujaku frowns.

“I’m offering to pay your bills,” he says. For a moment he is absolutely certain that Aoba is going to dump the soda he’s drinking on Koujaku’s head, Aoba looks so incensed.

“I’m not looking for a sugar daddy,” Aoba snaps. “I can take care of myself, and I don’t need you or anyone to turn me into a kept boytoy.”

“It’s not like that! I wouldn’t—”

“I don’t care how you meant it!” Aoba glares at him. “The only way you get to start making demands about my work is if you want to start letting me make demands about _your_ job. I’m an adult, I pay my own bills, and I like you a lot, but if you want to be my boyfriend you need to shape up, because I don’t need shit _exactly like this_.”

For several moments, Koujaku can think of absolutely nothing to say. The word _boyfriend_ sounds sweetly inside his head like a wind chime, but the rest of what Aoba said stings. “Is that why you wouldn’t take my money last time?” he asks at last.

“No,” Aoba says, a little too quickly.

“Then why?”

Aoba doesn’t answer immediately. His righteous indignation shifts down a little, and he drops his eyes. “Because I was hoping that maybe if you wanted to see me again, you’d just ask,” he says, much softer.

“Oh,” says Koujaku, and inside his head the wind chime that says _boyfriend_ goes off again, and again, and again. Koujaku pays for their dinner, but when Aoba goes out with him that night, they don’t have sex at all; they fall asleep watching a movie. And when Aoba does not ask to be paid in the morning, Koujaku does not mention it either.

After that, the jealousy does not go away, but it gets much easier to manage. And Koujaku notices that he does not see bruises on Aoba anymore, either.

They continue normally from there, and while most boyfriends do not stay together only in hotels, Koujaku cannot bring himself to take Aoba to his house and risk trouble busting down his front door, and Aoba never asks about it. The only other time they have something resembling a spat is the night he asks Koujaku about his eyepatch. “You don’t have to wear it if you want to take it off, you know,” Aoba says. He’s stretched out on the bed next to Koujaku now, languid after sex, and beautiful in his nudity.

Koujaku stiffens. “No,” he says slowly, trying to keep from showing how agitated just that suggestion makes him. “I have to keep it on.”

“It wouldn’t bother me,” Aoba says. He sits up, leaning against Koujaku, kissing the edge of Koujaku’s jaw. “I’ve seen worse, I promise.”

“ _No,_ ” Koujaku says—almost snarls. Aoba stiffens in shock, and Koujaku instantly feels bad. “It’s just sensitive,” he says, more gently. “It’s not that I mind you seeing it, but… it hurts to take the eyepatch off.”

“You should have just said that, then,” Aoba says crossly. “I was trying to make you more comfortable.”

“I’m sorry,” Koujaku, and to his delight, he is. He scoops Aoba up in his arms and kisses his lover’s chest, perversely pleased to feel genuinely bad over such a minor infraction, instead of irritated. It is uniquely pleasurable to care about something so dumb. He must be losing his mind. “Forgive me,” he murmurs. “Most of my coworkers don’t really know how to take a simple no for an answer.”

Aoba huffs, but at this point Koujaku can tell that his heart isn’t really in it. For some reason he finds this even more delightful. Aoba settles his arms around Koujaku’s shoulders, playing with his unbound hair. “You have to make it up to me,” Aoba decides. Koujaku grins against his chest.

“Mmmm. How should I do that?”

“You have to take me somewhere fun,” Aoba says.

“I suppose I do,” says Koujaku. He makes sure Aoba has lots of fun the rest of that night, too, but it’s this off-hand comment that gives Koujaku an idea. The next time he sees Aoba, Koujaku surprises him by taking him to a love hotel, a really silly one, with a bed shaped like a heart, a vending machine that dispenses sparkly sex toys, and a bucket full of iced pink champagne. Aoba laughs so hard he gives himself the hiccoughs, and when Koujaku teases him about it, Aoba gets revenge by shaking up the champagne and spraying Koujaku with it. They have sex on every surface in the suite, Aoba falls off the bed at one point, unmentionable body parts stick to and leave imprints on almost everything, and Koujaku wakes up to Aoba dumping an extra bucket of flower petals on him that he must have found somewhere in the room. It is the most idiotic and fun night of his entire life.

After that it becomes their little joke. It’s stupid to think he has such a thing with anyone, much less a prostitute, but it’s true. Almost every time they see each other, Aoba picks some minor, barely-there infraction to pretend injury over, and then Koujaku asks him how he can possibly make it up to him. This is how they go to two weekend festivals, three new movies (which is three more movies than Koujaku saw all the previous year), the botanical gardens, the city aquarium, and even to the beach. Koujaku is so distracted by how happy Aoba makes him that he barely notices the cloud of menace slowly strangling the city. 

So when Aoba intimates that he wants Koujaku to take him out to a fancy four-star restaurant, Koujaku thinks nothing of it. He’s certainly not expecting it to be the night his unlooked-for happiness shatters.

* * * * *

Koujaku is nervous.

He’s dressed in his handsomest suit, a dusky grey with white-and-blue pinstripes, a darker blue pocketsquare, and a white shirt with a fine pattern of cross-hatching. He’s meeting Aoba at the restaurant they have reservations at, a place called Muramoto’s; their reservation isn’t until 7:30, but Koujaku leaves early, intending to get there in time to arrange a few things for his dinner date.

He’s escorted into the lounge area by the maitre d’, and he’s just finished arranging for their server to bring them a bottle of their best imported prosecco after their main meal when movement at the front door catches his eye. He turns, and at the sight that greets him, his heart seems to stop, only to start again too forcefully and lodge itself in his throat.

Aoba has just walked in the front door, but it is Aoba as Koujaku has never seen him. He’s wearing a luminous sky-blue dress that both clings and swirls around his slender frame, draping attractively from his angular shoulders. His hair is pinned back from his face, just a few long strands left to flutter around his cheeks, the rest held in place with a tortoise-shell comb; Koujaku thinks he sees the glint of pearl at his throat and wrists, as well. Aoba comes inside, glancing around, and as he moves the dress seems to float around him, giving him the appearance of a dancer whose feet do not quite touch the ground.

He’s so beautiful Koujaku can hardly stand to look at him. His chest hurts; the knowledge hits him that he is head over heels in love with this boy, and that hurts even worse. For a few moments he can’t face it, and the urge to flee out the back door like a coward is overpowering, and then Koujaku masters himself and stands up from the bar to go and greet his date.

Aoba turns to look at him as Koujaku draws near, and when he sees Koujaku his face lights up. Koujaku can feel himself warming in response, and he offers his arm to Aoba as soon as he’s close enough.

“You got here early,” Aoba says, slipping his hand into the crook of Koujaku’s arm.

“Force of habit,” Koujaku says. “That dress looks amazing on you.”

“You like it?” Aoba beams. Koujaku has always liked that Aoba can take a compliment gracefully. Then again, Koujaku would probably like it if Aoba only spoke in haikus and Morse code, so perhaps he should stop pretending.

“I do,” says Koujaku. “I had no idea you even owned a dress.”

“I have a few,” Aoba says. “I only wear them on special occasions, though.” The maitre d’ appears to lead them to their tables then, saving Koujaku from having to formulate a response to this. Which is good; he doesn’t think he could come up with any coherent way to express the warmth that simple sentence conjures up inside his ribs.

Later, Koujaku will recall that dinner at the Muramoto as being one of the most enjoyable in his admittedly un-beautiful existence, but he will have difficulty recalling exact details. Instead, what he will recall is the tightness in his chest, that sweet-painful ache that is his newfound awareness of the fact that he’s capable of feelings like love; the way Aoba looks in his dress, like he’s walked out of the kind of fairy-tale where Koujaku would star as the monster under the bridge instead of the prince; the incandescent smile Aoba wears; and the vague, uneasy sense that anything this wonderful can’t possibly last.

As it turns out, he’s right.

They spend three hours at the restaurant, going through a full five-course meal, with the expensive prosecco at the end. Koujaku arranged for flowers to be brought to their table after they sat down, and when he pins one of the hibiscus blooms into Aoba’s hair, Aoba looks like he might cry. Koujaku pre-booked the penthouse in their usual hotel, and when they walk back after dinner Koujaku is dizzy, drunk on love as he has never been on alcohol.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he says to Aoba as soon as they’re safely in their room. Aoba breaks into that dizzying smile again, but there’s an edge to it that gives Koujaku a twinge.

“I just need to use the restroom,” Aoba says, and disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The water comes on. Koujaku sits on the edge of the bed and waits, smiling a little to himself; Aoba had more than a little to drink during dinner, just enough to be giggly.

His smile fades as minutes pass. The water is still running; abruptly Koujaku realizes that he can hear muffled noises through the door. “Aoba?” he calls. He gets up and walks to the door. Now he can hear the noises more clearly, and something in his chest twists as he realizes that the noises are badly-muffled sobs. “Aoba!”

“Sorry, I’m coming!” Aoba’s voice sounds very wrong. Koujaku tries the doorknob and finds it lock. “Hold on!”

“Aoba, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

There’s no answer, only the sound of the running water. Koujaku tries to come up with a reason for Aoba have the water on this long and cannot think of anything good. The tightness in his chest worsens. “Aoba!”

He’s just getting ready to break the door open when he hears a faint _click_. Koujaku twists the knob and pushes the door open, and for the second time in one night feels his heart stop at the sight in front of him.

Aoba sits on the closed toilet seat, hunched over, one hand in front of his face; it does little to obscure the tears staining his cheeks. He’s taken his hair out of its intricate up-do, free now to tumble around his face. His other hand is curled in his lap, along with the hibiscus flower Koujaku pinned to his hair, his hair-pin, and a new object that Koujaku cannot understand: a small, deadly-looking knife, the kind that can easily be hidden in someone’s clothes.

As Aoba must have hidden it in his dress.

“Aoba?” Koujaku takes a step forward and stops, at a loss.

“I didn’t want to do this.” Aoba sniffles, his voice thick with his tears. His eyes are downcast, looking at the things in his lap; as Koujaku watches, he shoves at the knife handle, and it goes skittering to the floor, clanging dully against the expensive porcelain tiles. “I don’t know why I thought I could make myself, but I can’t.”

“Can’t do what?” Koujaku asks the question because there is nothing else to ask, no other route open to him. He waits, the weight in his stomach growing heavier by the moment.

Aoba doesn’t answer immediately, though. “I kept waiting for you to give me a reason,” he says instead. His voice is uneven; as Koujaku watches, he presses both of his forearms against his stomach, as though warding off nausea. “But you never did. You were so charming and gentle and—and—”

“A reason to do what, Aoba?” Koujaku reaches out mechanically and turns off the water. He cannot take his eyes away from Aoba.

Aoba sniffles. “I was gonna wait,” he says. “I told myself, I was just gonna stick around till you became trouble, or until I figured out what you were hiding. You have this big secret and I thought for sure that… I thought you knew where they were keeping him.” He shakes his head a little, and gives a noise that might have been a laugh, or another sob.

“So you were just using me to find someone,” Koujaku says. His voice is flat, but one hand is now gripping the edge of the sink very tightly. The eye hidden beneath the patch throbs, a dull, deep pain.

“My brother.” Aoba looks up at him finally, and such is Koujaku’s lovesickness that even now, Aoba looks beautiful to him.

“You’ve found him, then.” Aoba gives a barely-there nod. “So now that I’ve outlived my usefulness, it’s time to let me go.”

Aoba lets out a short, sharp laugh. “That’s the thing,” he says. “You weren’t useful at all. You were fucking distracting. But I can’t stay any longer. I have to help Sei.” He stares at Koujaku, and this time Koujaku would swear that Aoba’s eyes change color right in front of him, sliding from their normal sweet hazel to an almost liquid gold. It’s a dangerous, unsettling color; it makes the hair on the back of Koujaku’s neck stand up in alarm.

“Did any of it matter to you? You could have kept making money off me, I would have given it to you happily.” Koujaku speaks before before he can stop himself, before he can question the wisdom of asking such awful things. “Or was I just good for a laugh while you tried to find out what you wanted to know?”

Aoba’s eyes flash. “Shut up,” he says hotly, his misery burning away almost instantly. “Was I faking it? Is that what you’re asking? If I was faking it I would never have let you know!” He might be dressed up like a delicate porcelain doll, but he’s still got plenty of force in his face and voice.

“What were you going to do?” Koujaku demands. “Stab me while I was asleep? Poison my drink? That would have gone badly for you.” That throbbing behind his eyepatch is getting worse, his voice growing deeper and more unsteady, and it occurs to him that he should go, he should go _now_ , but he can’t seem to help himself.

“Why are you even asking me that?” Aoba cries.

“Because you brought a fucking knife with you!” Koujaku shouts.

“You’re Yakuza! What was I supposed to do? What would you have done if I had just disappeared, roused the whole organization? I didn’t want to lie to you, I didn’t want to hurt you!”

Koujaku grits his teeth, hard. He can feel the bones in his jaw and temple pulsing, burning, the feel of new muscles knitting onto the bone. His breathing is growing more labored by the moment. “If you don’t want to lie to me, then why not just tell me the fucking truth,” he bites out.

Aoba stands, stuffing his hair-comb into his dress, the flower Koujaku pinned into his pretty hair tumbling to the floor. “Right,” he snaps. “Let me just share my secrets with a Yakuza from the organization that’s enslaved my brother, great idea. I love putting myself in danger.”

“You have no idea how dangerous,” Koujaku says. Aoba’s eyes widen slightly, and he takes a step back, his spine against the bathroom wall, and that’s when Koujaku realizes that his voice has dropped a full octave, and that he can _smell_ Aoba, smell his adrenaline and his fear. Aoba’s scent is off, somehow, not quite right, but Koujaku’s descent into rage makes it hard to think about it.

“Koujaku,” Aoba breathes.

“Get out,” Koujaku rasps. The fear-smell gets stronger, but mixed in with it is another, increasingly strong scent, like sex.

“Is this what you’ve been hiding?”Instead of looking terrified, Aoba looks excited. “Is this what all your nightmares are about?”

“Get OUT, Aoba!”

“No, show me! I want to see!” To Koujaku’s horror, Aoba darts forward and in one quick movement he snatches Koujaku’s eyepatch right off his face. Koujaku howls in shock and rage, and swipes at Aoba with a hand that’s more than half-claw now, but Aoba is fast. He ducks under Koujaku’s arm, running back into the bedroom. Koujaku snarls, whirling to give chase, and he gets a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he dashes after Aoba into the bedroom: the insane red-and-yellow eye that’s normally hidden under his eyepatch, too huge in its socket, blood welling from the corner.

Aoba runs not to the doorway but deeper into the suite, and Koujaku darts after him, murderously fast. Koujaku traps him in the bedroom, standing in the doorway and growling as Aoba slows, turning to face him, his stolen eye-patch still in Aoba’s hand. Koujaku’s mind is a whirl of rage and grief and something else, something darker and more base, something (lust) he can’t let himself give in to.

“Aoba,” Koujaku grates out. It’s hard to talk now; his canines are in the way, grown long for ripping and tearing like a wild animal. Koujaku reaches out, gripping the wooden door-frame, and it collapses under his hand, crushed by the strength of his inhuman fingers.

Aoba watches him with wide eyes. Wide eyes that that burn like molten gold, and a strange look of exhilaration where there should be only terror. “Koujaku,” he breathes, and the sound of his voice is… wrong. It’s too resonant, like it’s coming from many throats instead of just one, and it echoes painfully inside Koujaku’s head. Koujaku snarls and swipes his claws against the door, leaving huge scratch marks.

“Koooouujaku…” Aoba croons to him, crawling backwards onto the bed. His voice is a cloying drug, burning inside Koujaku’s head, and Koujaku snarls in panic and rage. That huge voice speaks to him again, calls him by name; the room sways, and suddenly Koujaku is on the bed, on top of Aoba, Aoba who is reaching up with both hands to cup Koujaku’s face.

At the touch of his hands, everything becomes a blur.

The world is slick and red, and reality throbs like a heartbeat, hot and needful. Aoba is beneath him on the bed, moaning and calling his name. He’s naked, his pale body writhing beneath Koujaku’s hands—claws, his hands are claws, and Aoba smells of sex and fear and excitement, smells like everything that Koujaku wants and needs. There’s a voice in his ears that he dimly understands is actually inside his head, and yet the size of the whole world, overshadowing all of reality. It’s a scary voice, but a sweet one, utterly intoxicating.

When he blurs back into reality, Aoba is spread out under him on the bed, naked on his back. His pale skin is littered with pink bite marks, and Koujaku feels a throb of lust at the sight of his marks on his mate. Aoba’s hair pools in a blue halo behind his head, his golden eyes glassy, face lit up with a savage joy. Aoba’s legs are spread, his cock hard and pink, laying against his belly; there’s a sheen of slick on the inside of his thighs. Koujaku’s nostrils flare at the delicious smell of his arousal, and he bends his head to lick and bite lightly at the skin there, nosing Aoba’s cock.

“That’s it,” Aoba’s voice says, breathless, but Koujaku hardly registers it. He snarls in displeasure as he encounters another smell, this one weirdly plasticky. Not Aoba, not him. “Shhh,” Aoba admonishes him, and spreads his thighs apart wider. Koujaku huffs out a breath and then gives in to the invitation. He moves up Aoba’s body on the bed, positioning himself between Aoba’s thighs. He mounts Aoba in one hard thrust, grunting as he buries himself in his mate’s body. Aoba cries out beneath him, his back arching in pleasure. Then Aoba’s hands come up to tangle in Koujaku’s thick red hair, and at his touch the world blurs again.

After that, it’s just a series of sensations and images: Aoba beneath him on the bed, head thrown back in ecstasy, sobbing; the metallic taste of Aoba’s blood; Aoba’s hands in his hair, Aoba’s arms around his shoulders, Aoba saying his name over and over like it’s a secret word of power. Over everything is a wash of savage joy, and whether it’s his or Aoba’s Koujaku cannot say.

Then darkness falls, and he knows no more.

* * * * *

He wakes in the morning with the worst headache he’s had in ten years. Koujaku has never had a migraine, or a hangover, but if he had, he would compare the throbbing in his skull to the worst kind of either. It feels like there’s a metal band pinching his skull, being screwed tighter and tighter by a tiny faerie with a grudge.

Koujaku groans and rolls over. He staggers blindly to his feet, and trudges into the bathroom to splash water on his face and try to clear some of the cobwebs from his brain. It’s only when he straightens up and catches sight of himself in the mirror that he realizes he’s seeing his own reflection with _both_ eyes, instead of just one; his eyepatch is missing.

What’s more, both eyes gazing back at him in the mirror are perfectly normal human eyes. Koujaku stares at himself in shock for a few moments more, then bolts back into the bedroom.

The sight that greets him turns his stomach. Aoba is curled up motionless in a bed that’s been utterly destroyed: the sheets are ripped to hell, the down mattress beneath torn open with puffs of feathers littering the bed. Many of the feathers are stuck together with what looks like blood; blood also stains the sheets, and several splotches are visible on Aoba’s pale skin even from here. Koujaku’s stomach drops into his feet, and he hurries over to the bed on legs that don’t want to work, his hands shaking with fear of what he’s going to find.

“Aoba,” he says roughly, and grabs Aoba’s shoulders, shaking him. “Aoba, wake up.” Aoba groans, stirring slowly under his hands. Koujaku sits down hard on the edge of the bed, weak with relief. His relief sours almost immediately as he surveys the destruction close-up, though. For several moments all he can do is sit and stare at the damage he’s inflicted, his brain too exhausted and his head too sore to cope with coming up with a response.

Up close, he can see that Aoba is indeed covered in smears of blood, but—and god, he hopes he’s not wrong—it seems to look worse than it actually is. Aoba isn’t actively bleeding, and while he’s got several bite-marks, most of them have barely broken the skin. He’s only got one serious bite, on the meat of his shoulder, but that one is bloody and angry-looking. Koujaku’s stomach turns as he stares at it, remembering now the tang of blood on his tongue, how good he’d thought it tasted.

 _I’m disgusting,_ he thinks, revulsion making bile rise in the back of his throat. _God, how could I…_

“Koujaku,” Aoba mumbles, breaking his train of thought.

“Aoba!”

“I was afraid you’d leave,” Aoba says. His voice is slurred, thick with sleep, and whatever happened to his eyes the night before is done with, their color restored to their usual hazel. Koujaku’s own eyes burn traitorously, and it takes him a moment to get himself together enough to respond.

“You’d be better off if I had,” Koujaku mutters. “God, Aoba, I’m so sorry…”

He scoops Aoba up from the bed and carries him gently into the bathroom, past the destroyed door and crumpled door-frame, intent on making sure Aoba’s injuries are tended to before anything else. His guilt and shame is such that he barely feels qualified to speak to Aoba, much less touch him, but neither can he stand the thought of simply running out the door, too cowardly to face the destruction he’s wrought.

Koujaku sees to Aoba’s injuries, washing and then bandaging the bite on his shoulder and making sure the others are at least clean. Aoba lets him. They don’t talk about what happened, not until Koujaku has ordered breakfast and an uncomfortable silence has fallen.

Aoba is the first to speak. “Do you want to tell me about what happened,” he says slowly, “or should I go first?”

Koujaku looks at him. Aoba rolls his eyes. “Fine, I’ll go first,” he says, “but don’t think you’re getting out of your half.” Koujaku cannot argue with this, though he’d like to.

The telling doesn’t take that long. Sei, the name Aoba mentioned the night before, is Aoba’s twin brother. They moved to Tokyo together a year ago. He’s missing—kidnapped, taken after someone witnessed Aoba’s abilities and lived to remember it. Sei protected Aoba and was taken alone, and Aoba has been looking for him ever since, almost six months now. It does not surprise Koujaku to hear that the culprits were his organization. Black Phoenix is large, and mostly amoral.

As to Aoba’s (and apparently by extension, Sei’s) abilities, those take even less time to tell about. Some of it Koujaku can guess; Aoba’s telepathic abilities are impressive and more than a little scary, and now it’s easy to see how Goro (and who knows how many others) could be both so taken with Aoba and yet “forget” about him afterwards, their head all the more sore for it.

“I didn’t want them to remember me,” Aoba says. “I just needed to know if they knew where Sei was, pay me, and forget about me.” They are sitting at the suite’s kitchen table now, eating the breakfast Koujaku ordered for them.

“Did they just tell you?” Koujaku asks. Aoba makes a face.

“Sometimes,” he says. “It’s easy when they were drunk, but sometimes I had to dig while they were asleep.”

Koujaku startles badly. Aoba sees it, and gives him a lop-sided smile. “You went digging in my dreams?”

Aoba mistakes the meaning behind the horror in Koujaku’s voice. “Just once!” Aoba says defensively. “I was looking to see if Sei was anywhere in your mind, but he wasn’t, so I left. The rest of the time was like… like…” Aoba flushes, dropping his eyes. “Like holding hands,” he mumbles.

Koujaku softens despite himself. The mental image of Aoba in his dreams, holding his hand and warding off his demons, is more than a little wonderful. “I’m surprised you stuck around after seeing any of my dreams,” is what he says after a moment, trying for lightness.

Aoba looks up at him, and Koujaku knows he’s not fooled. “You’re not the only guy whose nightmares I’ve seen,” he says (and Koujaku’s stomach twists with a possessive jealousy just at that small mental divergence), “but yours were definitely the worst.”

Koujaku says nothing. He has no idea how to explain this, or talk about it at all; he’s never in his life discussed his situation with anyone, not since his mother died ten years ago. After a moment, Aoba gets up from his chair and comes around to Koujaku, standing between Koujaku’s spread legs. Koujaku looks up at him, feeling sick, and sad, and scared.

“Tell me,” Aoba says softly. He wraps his arms around Koujaku’s shoulders, and with Aoba holding him like that, Koujaku finds at last that he can speak.

He tells Aoba slowly, his voice halting. Tells him about his childhood, so idyllic and long-ago as to feel like it belongs to someone else entirely, instead of the horror show most of his life has been. How his mother loved Seijurou, Koujaku’s father, despite knowing who and what he was. Tells Aoba how the despairing grandmother of one of Black Phoenix’s victims cast a curse on Seijurou’s family, and how an 8-year-old Koujaku pushed his mother out of harm’s way, the curse hitting him full-force instead. Instead of a normal boy, Koujaku became half-man, half-beast, a raving thing thirsting for blood and violence.

“It took months to learn to control him,” Koujaku says heavily. Aoba sits in his lap now, listening intently. “I had to be kept in a cage. And… My father convinced me that the best way to keep my mother safe was to join the syndicate and be his eyes and ears, to stop the threat before they could hurt her. By the time I realized that he just wanted to use me for his own ends, I had been in for 6 years, and my mother had passed away.”

Aoba looks at him with far more sympathy than Koujaku thinks he deserves. “Why didn’t you leave?” he asks.

Koujaku sighs. “I wanted to,” he says softly. “But where could I have gone? I’m a monster. I’m dangerous. I’m only fit to be a criminal.” He shrugs, eloquent and defeated. “If I was a braver man, I would have killed myself already.”

Aoba says nothing to this, just wraps his arms more tightly around Koujaku’s neck and kisses his hair. Koujaku shuts his eyes, holding Aoba against him, savoring his warmth, his soft skin and hair. Just holding him like this is a blessing, an oasis in the darkness.

“Your monster doesn’t scare me,” Aoba murmurs into his ear.

Koujaku pulls back to look at him. “I could have killed you,” he says. “I _hurt_ you.” Aoba smiles faintly.

“I liked it,” he says, and then corrects himself: “Well, the part of me you met last night did, anyway.”

“The part of you I met last night?” Koujaku repeats, alarmed. Abruptly, he remembers those wicked golden eyes, and that manic smile Aoba had worn as Koujaku had struggled not to give in to his transformation.

“It’s complicated,” says Aoba, sounding a little impatient now. He hesitates; Koujaku is suddenly aware that it is almost mid-morning and that they have spent nearly two hours talking already. “Sei calls him Sly, he’s kind of an asshole but he’s _my_ asshole, it’s—I can tell you later, if we have time. But I _need_ to go get Sei, I think they’re going to move him again soon and it took me this long to find him just once.”

Koujaku nods mechanically. So this really is the end, then. He always knew that there was no way that Aoba would stay in his life forever, and he knows he doesn’t deserve to keep him, but it still hurts to think that it’s coming to an end.

“Come with us,” Aoba says.

“ _What_?”

“Come with us,” Aoba repeats. “We have to disappear, and you hate it here anyway. Please come.”

“I…”

In the end, Koujaku agrees. Not because he thinks it’s a good idea, exactly, but because even without strange mental gifts and a mysterious worser half, Koujaku thinks Aoba could ask him for anything, and Koujaku would give it to him. After all, Koujaku has already willingly given him his heart, tainted and black as it is.

* * * * *

“You look troubled, Koujaku-san,” says Virus.

Koujaku glances at him. Virus is ahead of him, leading Koujaku down the hallway. Trip, Virus’s beefier cohort who could be his twin, walks on Koujaku’s other side. The two are notorious amongst Black Phoenix for their implacable natures and their lethality at their work.

“Of course I’m troubled,” Koujaku says shortly. “If my intel is correct, there is a spy amongst our most trusted people.”

“That is of course very upsetting,” Virus agrees.

“It’s good you brought this to our attention,” Trip adds. “Now we have the chance to nip it in the bud, before any damage is done.”

Koujaku nods, curt. Virus and Trip know that Koujaku has never cared for them, but he’s professional enough to work well with them anyway. He does what needs doing, and so do they. So when Koujaku came to his immediate superior with information about a potential attack on one of their recent human acquisitions, the man immediately sent Koujaku to join Virus and Trip as guardians, while the matter is sorted out.

They reach the end of the hallway and pass into a large, well-appointed room. All around are expensive curtains, carven oak furniture, lavish paintings, the works. In the center of the room is a bed, and in the bed is a pale slip of a boy, manacled to the mattress. The boy has black hair, huge dark grey eyes, and a curve to his face and jaw that Koujaku would know anywhere.

“Hello, Sei-san,” Virus says. He smiles at Sei with a shark’s mouth, all teeth and violence. Koujaku’s no-longer-bad eye throbs behind the eyepatch. “This is Koujaku-san. He came to warn us that someone was coming to take you away from us.”

“Hello, Koujaku,” Sei says. His voice is soft, meek. Koujaku thinks of the power that hides behind Aoba’s sweet demeanor, thinks of the dank fear-cloud over the city these past few months and how good it’s been for business. If what Koujaku suspects is true, Sei is at least as dangerous as his brother. _And as beautiful,_ Koujaku thinks.

“We can’t let our favorite boy get taken away,” Trip says. The warmth in his voice is like rotten fruit, sweet and full of poison.

“It’s good to be careful,” says Koujaku. He nods at Sei, and then without any further preamble, he draws his sword and cleaves Trip’s head from his shoulders in one liquid movement. Trip’s head hits the floor and bounces with a wet _thud_. Virus only has time to turn and shout before Koujaku has beheaded him as well, and in moments their headless bodies have toppled to the floor. Koujaku is already striding across the floor to Sei’s side, wiping his bloody sword on a throw-rug hung on the couch.

“Aoba is coming,” he says shortly, and the fear in Sei’s eyes evaporates. “We have to hurry, he won’t be able to hold the guards at the exit long.”

“You’re with Aoba?” Koujaku nods, gritting his teeth as he shifts just far enough to have the strength to yank Sei’s restraints out of the wall. Even though the eye behind his eyepatch is no longer the monster’s, the beast is still always with him just below the surface of his skin. Sei sits up as soon as the chain comes loose, swinging his long legs over the side of the bed and getting to his feet. He doesn’t look well, but his imprisonment does not seem to have robbed him of too much strength.

“This way,” Koujaku says urgently. He leads Sei back out the door, down the hallway he first came with Virus and Trip. They are in one of Seijurou’s many lodges, places he keeps for entertaining important guests or somewhere to retreat in luxury from work. It is less heavily guarded than many other locations, but also more remote. 

When Koujaku came to Virus and Trip with his concerns, they brought him here without delay. Koujaku had expected at least some probing, but there had been none; he’d had to hide in the bathroom to tell Aoba when and where to meet him. Virus and Trip should really have suspected Koujaku, but then again, why would they? Why would any of his associates? All his life Koujaku has been a loyal, brutal member of their syndicate, its most feared and unassailable defender. Why should they have ever thought he might finally find reason to throw his place there away?

Koujaku runs point just in front of Sei, his sword still drawn; halfway down the hall he pulls off his eyepatch, needing the benefit of binocular vision. “I thought I felt someone coming,” Sei says to him as they flee down dark hallways. “I found Aoba before, but I couldn’t tell him where I was because I didn’t know…”

“That’s what he said,” Koujaku says. “You did okay making half the city scared to leave their houses, though.”

He risks a glance at Sei as he says this, and sees the flush of guilt on Sei’s face. Bingo. “It’s easier to do something big and non-specific than to find just one person,” he says, awkward, and Koujaku stops long enough to reach out and grab his shoulder.

“Forget I said anything,” he says. “It’s over now. We’re leaving.” Sei nods, his face very pale under his dark hair. They move in near silence for the next five minutes, making their way down to the side entrance where the extra cars are kept.

“I feel him,” Sei says suddenly, eyes going wide. “Aoba! I can feel him!” He rushes past Koujaku, his haste making him incautious.

“Sei, wait!” Koujaku runs after Sei, but as they turn a corner at the end of a hallway Koujaku slows, staring in shock at the sight ahead of them.

The hallway leads into another room, this one larger and appearing to be some kind of parlor. Bodies litter the floor and furniture, and while none of them are bloody or appear at all injured, their wide, staring eyes leave Koujaku wondering how much of their minds are intact. Aoba stands in the middle of the room, breathing a little hard. His eyes are that burnished gold again, and Koujaku remembers what Aoba said about his “other” self.

“Aoba!” Sei flies past Koujaku, and Aoba lets out a wild cry as his brother rushes into his arms. Koujaku stands awkwardly at the edge of the room, just watching as the twins embrace, hugging each other tightly and rubbing their foreheads together. Koujaku has just dropped his eyes when there’s a rush of wind like a door into a storm has opened—

—or like a circuit has just been closed.

Koujaku looks up to see Aoba and Sei holding each other, lit by a weird black-and-white light, as though he were looking at photo negatives of them. For a moment he would swear that their hair has grown long, falling to their feet, and it seems almost to join each other, as though the hair of one twin finishes at the scalp of the other. Static electricity dances all along the surface of Koujaku’s skin, every hair on his body standing on end. The power rushing through the room makes him giddy, the darkness inside him throbbing in sympathy.

Then the storm passes, the wind dying as swiftly as it came, and in front of Koujaku are just a pair of normal-looking brothers holding hands.

Koujaku smiles, a little sadly. He knows now that he’s done the right thing. He also knows that no matter how much he loves Aoba, or how happy Aoba makes him, Aoba doesn’t need him; he already has his other half.

“Let’s go,” is all he says. Aoba and Sei look up at him, and Koujaku ushers them along, moving quickly out the door at the other end of the room and rushing into yet another hallway.

Their plan almost works. Almost. They make it down to the one of the main audience chambers, a stately old ball-room complete with chandelier and mirrored walls, before they realize that they’re surrounded. They are in a sort of pass-through room, a vestibule between rooms with a doorway on either end; Aoba quickly locks the door behind them, and Koujaku covers the front. Aoba and Sei huddle out firing aim in the doorway while Koujaku assumes a defensive position before them, his sword drawn in front of him, glaring at the men who have at one time or another all worked with him, all of them now holding guns trained on Koujaku.

“Koujaku,” says a voice from the middle of the men up ahead. Koujaku’s heart stops in his chest. In the center of a room is a man who looks for all the world like an older version of Koujaku, with wire-frame glasses and streaks of silver in his mane of black hair. Kurogawa Seijurou is wearing a fine silk suit and a smile that says he knows he’s going to get his way. Koujaku grits his teeth and tightens his hands on his sword.

“There’s no need for this kind of violence, Koujaku,” says Seijurou. His voice is calm, persuasive. He might be talking to Koujaku about attending a party, or the weather. “You know that I’m a reasonable man who rewards those who have earned it.” All around him, the other Yakuza stand at the ready, all of them with weapons cocked and ready. Aoba may have locked the door behind them, but Koujaku knows it’s only a matter of time before someone breaks it down from the other side, and that those men will also be armed.

“All you do is lie,” Koujaku says flatly. “I’m not interested in any more of your promises. They’re only serving yourself.”

Seijurou tsks at him. “How about this,” he says. “Since you are so concerned with these boys’ well-being, I’ll make them yours. No one can touch them but you, and you will oversee everything they do in our family. Doesn’t that sound fair?” He spreads his hands. “If anyone in this company has earned it, it’s you.”

Koujaku hesitates.

He has a brief, powerful vision of Aoba and Sei living happily in his house, of Aoba naked in his bed, watching him with sleepy lovers’ eyes. Aoba wouldn’t have to sleep with other men anymore. He and Sei could be together. Koujaku could protect them and give them everything they want. They could be happy.

But almost instantly the vision turns to ashes in his mouth. Even if Seijurou does keep his promise (and chances are good that he would; he’s stayed leader of Black Phoenix for this long due to both his excellent leadership and his cunning, and he’d go far to keep someone as vicious as Koujaku under his control), there’s no way he’d let a pair of boys as powerful as Aoba and Sei go unused. He’d force them to work for him, to destroy Black Phoenix’s enemies and wear themselves out using their powers. He’d make them into monsters, just like he did to Koujaku.

Koujaku has already accepted his own damnation. But he will die before he lets Seijurou ruin Aoba and Sei.

Koujaku takes a deep breath. “Do you swear?” he demands. “No one will touch them but me. They live with me, they’re mine. You swear?”

Seijurou gives him a warm smile, an approving father to the core. “Of course, Koujaku,” he says. “I give you my word.”

“Koujaku,” Aoba breathes behind him, horrified.

Koujaku ignores him. “Alright,” he says, and slowly straightens. Seijurou gestures for the men holding guns on Koujaku to stand down, then starts to come forward—

And Koujaku swings his sword, one swift cut into the cords and chain that run up wall beside the door, and then everything is chaos.

The lights in the room go out, plunging them instantly into darkness. The great chandelier overhead shudders, and seconds later Koujaku hears the screams as it comes crashing down, directly onto where Seijurou and at least half his men were standing only moments before.

“Get out while I distract them, and _stay down_ ,” Koujaku snarls at the twins, and drops to all fours, his sword clattering to the ground as the change rolls over him in a wave. Instead of fighting it, he rushes into his madness headlong, sinking into the red mist for what will almost certainly be the last time.

It’s a gift, in a way. He might not be able to destroy all of the hydra’s heads, but he can strike a deadly blow. He only hopes that Aoba will be able to get free, that together he and Sei can slip away in the chaos. He thinks they can; Aoba is strong.

Koujaku rushes into the darkness. His roars shake the rafters overhead, mingling with the terrified screams of panicked Yakuza. He tastes blood, and flesh, and smells the fear-stink of men trying vainly to get away from their death. There are gunshots, and shouting, and raw red pain in his guts and shoulders.

Finally, there is nothing but darkness.

* * * * *

Koujaku swims.

It’s dark, but warm, and comfortable. He floats on a wide black sea, staring up at a sky lit only by twinkling stars. The sky is familiar, he thinks. After a little while he realizes it’s the sky above the field near the house he lived in as a child, and he’s floating in the little pond there. But the water was never this warm.

It’s so nice here, he thinks. More than once he’s heard voices calling to him, saying his name, but they’re distant and easy to ignore, so he stays where he is. It’s warm here. He’s safe. Nothing hurts.

Time passes. He isn’t sure how long, and to be honest he doesn’t really care. Koujaku understands on some level that if he stays here for too long, he will never be able to leave, but this understanding does not bother him in the least. He _wants_ to stay.

But then the time comes when the voices are louder, and closer. Koujaku floats in the water, experiencing an undercurrent of fear as the voices come closer. Then he recognizes them—one of them, at least. _Aoba?_

“Koujaku!”

Koujaku dips beneath the water, then rights himself and swims to shore. The horizon stretches away into invisibility, but in one direction there’s light, the grey light of morning before the sun has actually come up. People are coming towards him. Koujaku spots the blue head of hair almost immediately, and then stares in confusion, because there is not one but two people walking towards him, and both of them have blue hair. _What…?_

“Koujaku!” Aoba spots him, and breaks into a run, darting across the ground towards him. He’s dressed the way he was the first day Koujaku met him, in that t-shirt and jeans. He flings himself into Koujaku’s arms, kissing him deeply.

“Aoba,” Koujaku murmurs, hugging him and kissing him back. Then he gets a good look at the other person here in this no-man’s land, and feels his tongue cleave dumbly to the roof of his mouth.

The other person is also Aoba. But there is something very different about him; he’s dressed in an orange-and-grey hooded sweatshirt, and his eyes are a livid gold. “Hi, Koujaku,” the other Aoba says, and grins at him. It’s a slightly manic grin, and Koujaku remembers again how different Aoba seemed the night Koujaku attacked him.

“What’s going on?” Koujaku asks, and he’s unable to keep the confusion from his voice.

“You’re unconscious,” says the Aoba in Koujaku’s arms. “Granny says you’ve mostly healed from the gunshots and your brain isn’t injured, but you still wouldn’t wake up.”

“So we came to get you,” says the other Aoba. His voice sounds strange as he says it, though, and for a moment Koujaku isn’t sure if he said “I” or “we.”

“So we’re in my head?” Both Aobas nod. Koujaku glances from one to the other. “Why are there two of you?” he asks, when no explanation seems to be forth-coming.

The Aoba with the gold eyes laughs. It’s not a completely nice sound. “You’re not the only one around with a dark half,” he says. Now he comes forward, and despite his reservations when not-Aoba leans up to kiss Koujaku, Koujaku kisses back, pulling this second boy into his arms and hugging him, too. “Sei calls me Sly Blue,” this second Aoba murmurs.

“You came out before,” Koujaku says, and Sly nods. “When I… when..”

“I told you he liked it,” Aoba says, sounding both fond and exasperated.

“But I hurt you,” Koujaku says awkwardly.

“Not you,” Sly says, confusingly, but then he turns away, scanning the area for something. He grins a moment later, apparently finding what he’s looking for. “Him.”

Koujaku turns to look where Sly is looking, and suffers a surprise so badly his knees nearly give out under him. Huddled in the bushes is a beast, a creature Koujaku knows intimately and yet has never actually seen with his own eyes. His other self is larger, beefier in the shoulders, Koujaku’s many tattoos swirling down around its arms like an angry infection. Instead of Koujaku’s glossy black hair, the monster has a tangled red mess, like a lion’s mane. If Koujaku was closer, he knows he’d be able to see the thing’s mouth full of killing teeth, knows he’d see the vicious monster for what it is.

But right now his monster doesn’t actually look scary at all. In fact, his beast-self is slumped over like a scolded dog, the fringe of its unkempt red hair falling down over its eyes. Looking at him this way, Koujaku feels a surprising twinge of pity. Has the monster been hiding over here this whole time?

“Come here, beastie,” Sly calls. He crouches down, holding out his arms towards the monster. Koujaku has to stifle the urge to stop him, and forces himself to just wait a moment.

For a moment, the monster doesn’t even seem like it’s going to oblige them. Sly calls to him repeatedly, though, and finally the beast shuffles out, moving awkwardly down on all fours as it crosses over to the other three. “That’s it,” Sly coos. “That’s right. You’re so beautiful, Koujaku…” Koujaku watches with a mixture of horror and amazement as Sly plunges his hands into that thick tangled mess, kisses the beast right on his ugly face.

The monster makes a low keening noise, pushing its blunt face against Sly’s, and then it shoves Sly over onto his back and climbs on top of him. Koujaku shouts in alarm, but Aoba grabs him, stopping him from going over. After a moment Koujaku realizes that Sly is laughing, and that the monster is licking and biting gently at Sly’s face and jaw, like a large, overly-friendly dog.

“How can you let him touch you like that?” Koujaku asks, revolted.

“He’s part of you,” Aoba says. He slips his arms around Koujaku’s waist, looking up at him intently. “Just like Sly is part of me.” Sly laughs helplessly, and then makes a wet, happy noise as the beast starts pulling Sly’s shirt open, play-biting at Sly’s pale throat. Koujaku lets out a yell as the beast sinks teeth into Sly’s shoulder, but Aoba stops him again, and Koujaku can only watch as Sly moans, arousal blossoming under his skin. Sly wraps his arms around the beast’s shoulders, sighing; the look on his face is pure ecstasy.

Koujaku has to turn away finally. Aoba comes around to face him again, tilting Koujaku’s face up till Koujaku looks him in the eyes. “You can’t stay here,” Aoba says.

“I’m a monster,” Koujaku says hotly. “You’re better off without me. And you have Sei back now, anyway.”

Aoba responds by shoving Koujaku hard in the chest, so that Koujaku stumbles and almost trips. “How dare you,” Aoba says, flushed now too. “I asked you to come with me! What more do you want, an engraved invitation?”

“Just because you don’t seem to mind that I _hurt_ you doesn’t mean I’m okay with it too!” Koujaku takes an unsteady step back, but Aoba just advances, refusing to let him go. “Leave me alone! I was happy to die for you, it’s the best I deserve!”

“Fuck that!” Aoba’s eyes are too bright—not with power, Koujaku realizes, but with tears. “I won’t accept it. I won’t!”

“You’re better off without me,” Koujaku repeats. This time Aoba slaps him. Hard. Koujaku staggers, and falls ungracefully onto his ass, staring up at Aoba in shock. They might be in a space somewhere inside Koujaku’s own mind, but that slap _hurt_. He opens his mouth to say something, some useful response, but Aoba’s next words rob him of that strength.

“Do you love me or not?” Aoba demands.

Koujaku stares at him. “More than anything,” he whispers.

Aoba kneels, crawling between Koujaku’s legs. He reaches out, cradling Koujaku’s face in both hands. “I love you, too,” he says, his voice suspiciously choked. “Please don’t leave me. I know it’s selfish… but I’ll never forgive you if you leave me.”

“Aoba…” Koujaku finds that all his defiance has stopped up in his throat in a stubborn lump, making it hard to breathe. Mutely, he pulls Aoba into his arms, and Aoba curls up against him, the tears against Koujaku’s cheek every bit as wet and warm as reality.

Koujaku shuts his eyes for a moment, searching for some hidden reserve to call on. When he opens them again, his monster and Sly are gone, but Koujaku knows they have not vanished; they have just sunk back into their respective selves. The monster is always with him, as Sly seems to be with Aoba. This thought, of all things, gives him a little strength—for his beast is many terrible, unloveable things, but he has always been strong.

“I love you so much,” he whispers to the soft hair under his lips. “I didn’t even think I was capable of it anymore, until I met you. But I’m scared of hurting you. I don’t know how to be anything but a Yakuza…”

“You saved us,” Aoba says. His arm has snuck around Koujaku’s shoulders, holding him fast. “And you’ve already been good to me. Please, just… I don’t want a promise. I just want you to at least try.”

Koujaku sighs. He should have known he had no choice from the minute Aoba appeared on the horizon of his hidden self. “Alright,” he says, because there’s nothing else to say. Aoba pulls back and kisses him by way of response, and Koujaku thinks that if this is his doom, at least he can die happy.

* * * * * 

He wakes up to a room full of sunlight.

The futon he’s in is soft, comfortable; the comforter on the bed is hand-made, slightly uneven stitches suggesting hand-quilting. All around the room are signs of its usual inhabitants, from old sports trophies (soccer, Koujaku notes with interest) to photos of endearingly gawky twin boys with their arms around each other and faces beaming with delight. Posters of bands and movies plaster the walls. The closet door isn’t quite closed, and inside it Koujaku sees glimpses of t-shirts and yukatas.

Koujaku sits up, wincing slightly at the cascade of aches and pains that sends through his chest and ribs. That’s when he notices the person in bed with him: Aoba, curled up in a t-shirt and shorts, still unconscious on top of the mattress next to him. Koujaku is still staring when something small and black comes bounding into the room, wagging a furry tail.

“Koujaku!” the dog says, in a shockingly deep voice. It wags its tail harder, tiny pink tongue hanging out.

“Uh,” says Koujaku.

Beside him, Aoba sits up, rubbing at his eyes. “Ren!” The dog (or All-mate, Koujaku realizes) jumps up onto the bed and into Aoba’s arms, licking his face and then peering curiously at Koujaku.

“Koujaku is awake,” Ren says.

Aoba smiles at Koujaku, and suddenly Koujaku is warm all the way to the bottom of his aching ribs. “Yeah,” Aoba says. “Finally decided to rejoin us. What a jerk. Go tell Granny, okay? We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“Of course,” says Ren, and jumps lightly down from the bed before scurrying out of the room.

Koujaku looks at the boy in bed beside him. Aoba looks at once exactly like the boy Koujaku fell so hard for, and like a totally new person. “A few minutes?” Koujaku repeats after a moment, and Aoba’s grin widens.

“Yeah,” he says, in a softer voice. “I’m a little slow in the morning, sometimes.”

“Ah,” says Koujaku, and then he has a lap full of squirming, barely-clothed boyfriend, and argument becomes both pointless and unnecessary.

They do make it downstairs in another fifteen minutes, there to introduce Koujaku to the bewilderingly domestic and welcoming home he’s found himself in. Granny turns out to be a surprisingly spry and sharp-witted old woman by the name of Seragaki Tae, who greets them by scolding Aoba soundly for being a lazybones before directly Koujaku (somewhat more kindly) into one of the chairs at the table. Aoba takes his tongue-lashing good-naturedly, even dropping a kiss on his grandmother’s cheek before helping to set out dishes. Sei appears minutes after Koujaku and Aoba, apparently fresh from the shower, judging from his damp hair. To Koujaku’s great shock, Sei comes directly over to him and hugs him.

“I’m glad to see you up and about,” Sei says, leaving Koujaku sitting stunned in the chair as he goes to help Granny with the various dishes on the counter and stove.

“I don’t remember very much,” Koujaku begins, and then Tae jabs a spoon at him in warning.

“Save that kind of talk for after breakfast,” she says. “Serious matters should not be discussed before food!”

“Yes, Grandmother,” Koujaku says, shrinking a little into his chair. He flashes on the memory (or was it a dream?) of his monster self, non-existent dog ears laid back against his skull, and has to stifle a laugh.

Breakfast is wonderful. Tae’s kitchen is bright, airy, and immaculately clean, and her food tastes like it’s been sent down directly from heaven; her donuts in particular could stop a war. Koujaku discovers he’s not just hungry but ravenous, and every time he’s cleaned his plate and makes the mistake of glancing away for a half-second, Tae refills it, until he’s groaning and begging her to let him stop.

After breakfast they retire to the living room for tea, and over their steaming mugs, Tae finally permits Aoba and Sei to fill Koujaku in on the past two weeks. Aoba curls up against Koujaku’s side on the couch as Sei tells him how Koujaku’s surprise tactic had sent their syndicate into complete chaos, permitting Aoba and Sei to use their joined powers to subdue the remaining panicked members. They hypnotized a few weak-willed members into carrying a bleeding and unconscious Koujaku out to a car, and from their made their getaway. Koujaku was astonished to hear they had successfully gotten themselves and him off the mainland altogether, and were now on the tiny island on which they had grown up, a place called Midorijima.

“I used some of the money I’d been saving to get us a private room on the boat,” Aoba says. His voice is light, but if Koujaku has to guess, Tae is still unaware of the exact type of work her grandson has been doing on the mainland.

Once they were home, Tae helped nurse a half-dead Koujaku slowly back to health. But even after his injuries took a turn for the better, Koujaku had remained stubbornly unconscious. It wasn’t until Aoba had decided to dive into his dreams (“Scrap,” Tae calls it) that Koujaku finally surfaced fully back into the land of the living.

Throughout the story, Koujaku finds himself increasingly feeling like an interloper into this obviously-innocent world. Aoba might have played the part of a prostitute more than aptly, but he’s not the sort of desperate creature Koujaku was so used to; here, his family reunited, he seems too sweet and wholesome to deserve to be around someone like Koujaku, no matter what they said to each other in that deep dream.

It’s Tae who shakes him out of his funk. “Kurogawa Seijurou was your father’s name?” she asks shrewdly. At Koujaku’s nod, she leans back in her chair, shaking her head slightly. “What a small world,” she says. “I knew your mother, Koujaku.”

Koujaku stares. “You knew my mother?” he repeats weakly, when his words return.

Tae nods. “She was a local girl. She grew up around here; we worked together. That girl always believed the best of everybody, even when she had plenty of evidence to the contrary.”

“Oh,” says Koujaku. A chill is crawling down his spine, as though a cold wind had snuck into the room and only into his shirt.

He swallows, trying to find words, but Tae can apparently read him like a book, because she gives him a small smile. “I’d be happy to tell you about her sometime. I think I might even have some pictures of her somewhere.”

“I’d like that,” Koujaku says weakly. Tae smiles into her tea mug.

* * * * *

Koujaku spends a few more days recuperating before he feels up to going out. He’s apparently been sleeping in Aoba’s bed, but despite his discomfort at the situation, Tae seems to have no objections to Aoba sleeping in it with him. Or maybe she does; Koujaku doesn’t exactly ask her about it, but Aoba crawls into bed with him every night just the same.

The other person in their bed is more unexpected.

The first night after awakening, Koujaku is already half-asleep when he feels Aoba get up from the bed. Aoba is halfway across the room before the knock even comes at the door, a soft, barely-audible rap of knuckles on wood. Aoba opens the door, and Sei is standing there in his pajamas, arms crossed awkwardly across his chest. “Sei,” Aoba says, and then stops.

“I’m sorry,” Sei whispers, but Koujaku sits up, holding his hand up to stop Sei’s apology.

“It’s okay,” he says, because he may not have the telepathic powers of his beautiful god-twins, but he knows exactly why Sei’s here, all the same. “Come in.”

Sei slips inside, and then, shyly, at Koujaku’s and Aoba’s coaxing, he crawls into bed with them. It’s a tight fit, but Koujaku does not mind, not even a little. He’s had intimate experience with the kinds of horrors that can plague you at night.

After that, Sei creeps over to join them almost every night. Koujaku sleeps in the center, with Sei on the side with his back to the wall, and Aoba on the outside. When Sei wakes sometimes in the middle of the night (or sometimes, it’s Aoba), Koujaku calms him down, holding his boys close until one or both settles back into sleep. It isn’t until about a week into the arrangement that Aoba mentions to him that Koujaku has shifted into his more bestial self at night a few times, and Koujaku almost has a conniption until he realizes why.

It’s the same reason Sei came to sleep in bed with them in the first place; maybe the same reason why Aoba connected with him so strongly from the start. If his beast has a silver lining, it’s to be so terrifying that all other monsters or nightmares pale in comparison.

* * * * *

Time passes.

Koujaku stays with the Seragakis, who insist on him living with them until he has found a new job and gotten a new home. Koujaku throws out his wallet and everything in it as soon as he’s up and about again; there’s money in his bank account, but he doesn’t dare try to access it for fear of leading Black Phoenix to their safe haven here on Midorijima. Aoba and Sei show no interest in trying to move back to the big city or the mainland, and for his part Koujaku is more than happy to take refuge on their island home. And while Koujaku is newly broke, it turns out that Aoba has saved almost all the money he earned turning tricks, and the extra savings is enough to help them all get by during their return to normal life.

(The other thing Koujaku throws out is his eyepatch. There’s no need for it anymore, not when both of his eyes are perfectly normal.)

Getting a job proves easier than Koujaku might have feared, largely due to Tae’s influence; she seems to hold considerable sway over local opinions, and soon enough Koujaku has found himself a job as assistant to a local handyman, a sturdy man in his forties who seems willing to teach Koujaku the tools of his trade. It’s hard work, but rewarding; Aoba seems to find it sexy, as well, which is hilarious but not something Koujaku’s about to ignore, either. It’s also a wonderful contrast to the sort of work he’s spent most of his life doing.

Aoba and Sei return to work, as well. Aoba takes a job at a local cafe, cooking and baking, while Sei (along with Ren) go to work at a junk shop. Tae resumes her pharmacy and well-visits work, and together their house is a little small, but wonderfully welcoming. Koujaku doesn’t know what to make of it.

Aoba aand Koujalu also return to their lovemaking, something which Koujaku finds himself profoundly grateful for. They have to be more careful about when they sleep together, but Sei never once walks in on them (Koujaku wonders whether he knows when his brother is occupied, and tries not to think too hard about it). They change the sheets a lot, and Koujaku expects Tae to comment on that, too, but she never does.

(The thought _also_ occurs to Koujaku that if Sei wanted him, and Aoba was okay with it, Koujaku would happily take Sei to bed as well. Sei is as beautiful as Aoba, though quieter and more reserved, and Koujaku would gladly lay down in traffic for either of them. But while Sei clings to him at night to ward off his bad dreams, never once does the topic of sex come up, and so Koujaku does not mention it.)

He takes each day as it comes, which is hard, until the day when it’s not, and that’s strange too. He feels like a character in a play who has run out of script. This was never supposed to be in the cards for him; he was supposed to die at the end of the second act, throat slit for his treachery, but instead he survived past final curtain, and now he has to figure out what to do with himself. He keeps this thought to himself and works hard to be a good visitor and boyfriend, and he thinks he’s doing a good job at it until one day Tae sits him down in the kitchen when Aoba and Sei aren’t home and fixes him in place with a none-too-friendly glare.

“You need to set down that weight you’re carrying, Koujaku,” she says sternly.

“Tae-san…” Koujaku trails off as Tae lifts a finger in warning.

“I don’t want an explanation,” she says. “Or details. I don’t want to know what you’ve done, even if you wanted to tell me. But you need to understand that however you feel, you have only one route open to you unless you want to continue doing damage instead of doing good.”

Koujaku sighs. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says reluctantly. “But—”

“Be quiet,” Tae snaps, and Koujaku’s jaw clacks shut. “You’ve spent your life doing awful things. This is the truth; you have to face it, even if it hurts. You can’t fix what you did, but you can start putting goodness into the world, to make up for the years spent doing wrong. And it is going to be hard. It would be much easier to look for a way out, to walk away and not face what you’ve done, but if you want to be the man Aoba thinks you are, you’re going to have to stick it out.”

“But I’m _not_ a good man,” Koujaku says, unable to help himself. “It would be better if I left. Someone might come looking for me, or I might—”

Tae silences him with a glare so withering it’s a wonder all the flowers in the house don’t wilt at once. “It would be better for _you_ , maybe,” she says. “But calling yourself a bad person is just an out you give yourself. Being good is hard. Being ‘bad’ is cheating, because then you can blame your mistakes on being bad instead of taking responsibility for them. Stop being lazy.”

Koujaku keeps his mouth shut this time, stunned. He can’t remember the last time someone sat him down like this and chewed him out, like a schoolboy, for some infraction, but it’s weirdly comforting.

“That’s better,” says Tae, when Koujaku has kept his trap shut for a good ten seconds. “Now, I’m not going to tell Aoba about this, or Sei; they have enough on their minds. But I want you to find some way to show Aoba that you mean to stay, and not do something stupid.” She pauses, and then adds, in a lower voice, “He’s still afraid you’re going to kill yourself.”

Koujaku’s mood instantly plummets, his heart wrenching. He pictures Aoba sitting up in their room, hugging a pillow, his face drawn with anxiety, and his guilt intensifies. “Yes, Tae-san,” he says wretchedly. “I will.”

Tae watches him for a moment, and then her expression softens. “Good,” she says. “I have something you might think about…”

* * * * *

“Where are we going, again?” Aoba trails after Koujaku by a few feet, hugging a jacket around himself a little more tightly. “It’s chilly up here, I wish I’d brought my scarf…”

“The shrine at the top of the hill, but I’m not entirely certain where it is,” Koujaku says. He stops, waiting for Aoba to catch up to him, and then wraps his own scarf around his lover’s neck.

“Koujaku, you—!”

“I’m not cold,” Koujaku says mildly. Aoba glowers at him, but he hunkers down in Koujaku’s scarf all the same. Koujaku takes a moment to admire how nice a picture Aoba makes wrapped up in Koujaku’s scarf, and then he extends his elbow. After a moment, Aoba takes it, and they keep walking.

The shrine comes into view around the next bend of the trail. Koujaku and Aoba ascend the steps, a tightness in Koujaku’s chest that he can’t quite control. Aoba seems to guess what he’s thinking, though, because he doesn’t say anything, just holds tight to Koujaku. Aoba stands by as Koujaku leaves his offering and makes his prayer. His heart is quiet as he bows in front of the alter.

He pictures his words taking flight, whisked up into the atmosphere like birds or flecks of dust, lighter than air. He asks for strength, and forgiveness, and most of all for permission: permission to accept the love that he’s been given. He thinks that his mother would grant him all those requests, even if no one else ever would. What Tae has told him about her matches his own vague recollections of her, and it makes it easier for him to open up and ask for what he needs.

Finally he stands. Aoba comes over to him and takes his hand, and wordlessly they go out of the shrine, hands still linked. When they get to the little park area down below the shrine, where there are some benches and a pretty little garden, Koujaku tugs Aoba over to sit down on a bench with him.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he says to Aoba. Anxiety flickers around Aoba’s face, there for a moment and then gone. If Koujaku hadn’t been explicitly looking for it, he would never have caught it. Koujaku takes a deep breath. “I have an appointment to sign a lease on an apartment day after tomorrow.”

Aoba’s eyes widen. “What?”

“It’s a two-bedroom,” Koujaku continues. He keeps his voice soft, steady. It’s harder than he would have thought. “But, I was hoping…” He clears his throat. “I was thinking that, um. If you wanted to… you could keep your stuff in the second bedroom, but we could use it as a guest bedroom too. For when Sei wants to come over and see us.”

“You’re asking me to move in with you,” Aoba says. His tone is indecipherable.

Koujaku nods. “It’s not far from the house. It needs a little work, and it’s not perfect, but, uh. I thought you could come with me tomorrow to see it, if—”

“Yes,” Aoba says, cutting him off. “Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll move in.”

Koujaku draws in a slow breath. “Okay,” he says, and he can’t keep the tremble from his voice, but Aoba squeezes his hand and it’s alright.

He may not ever get all the answers that he asked for, but he has the one that he needs.

* * * * *

They move in a week after the trip to the shrine. Sei helps them, as well as a friend of the twins’ they reconnected with from their teenage years, a tattoo artist and bartender called Mizuki that Koujaku takes an instant liking to. Aoba makes everyone curry katsudon for dinner, and Koujaku eats so much that after their guests leave, he winds up staggering directly to the bedroom, where he passes out without even undressing.

In the morning, Aoba wakes him up by climbing on top of him and kissing him, over and over, until Koujaku sits up, hard and alert and already groping his boyfriend’s ass. But then Aoba pulls back, hands on Koujaku’s shoulders.

“Let me be good to you,” Aoba says.

Koujaku regards him uncertainly. “How did you…” he begins, only to trail off when Aoba smiles at him.

“You let your guard down,” Aoba says. For a moment his eyes seem to burn a polished gold, and then it’s gone. Koujaku almost presses him for more, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter; he’s right. So when Aoba pushes him down on the bed, Koujaku lets him.

It’s hard to take, to just accept. Koujaku trembles as Aoba showers him with kisses over all of his scars, his soft hands roaming over every inch of Koujaku’s body, tenderness in every touch. Aoba sucks him off (Koujaku refuses to give in to the voice in his head that notices what an expert Aoba is at this) and when he comes, Koujaku’s strangled cry is muffled in the arm thrown over his face to hide his tears. Afterwards, Aoba settles against him in bed, propped up on an elbow to watch Koujaku.

“You’re still hard,” Koujaku says after a moment, his voice husky. By way of response, Aoba leans down and kisses each of his wet eyes; Koujaku’s eyepatch is long gone, his features perfectly normal.

“It’s alright,” Aoba says softly. “Neither of us work today, there’s plenty of time.”

Koujaku has to smile at that. “You’re right,” he says. “There’s plenty of time.”

Aoba smiles back, and leans down to kiss him on the mouth this time. Koujaku wraps both arms around his shoulders and holds him close, and it’s enough.


End file.
